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From Venture Beat
Just as summer's sear leads to winter's freeze, the unchecked growth of ad blockers (30 percent increase last year) will lead to a comeback in banner ads.
The reason comes down to why most people install ad blockers in the first place. It's not for ideology — an obsession with privacy or an anti-capitalist bent — it's a cost-benefit calculation. The price of an ad blocker is a free, two-minute download, and the benefit is less friction while browsing the web. Good deal!
Recent trends will change those economics and for some, it's already happened.
[...] You installed your ad blocker to stave off interruptions like these, but now ad blockers are the surest way of attracting them. That's because publishers will tug ceaselessly at your pant legs bawling, "please won't you whitelist us in your ad blocker!" And these messages will only grow in number and fervor for two reasons.
Sounds like whistling past the graveyard, or reading goat entrails to me. The whining about disabling your ad blocker is generally much more polite than the blocked ads, so no thanks.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday July 31 2017, @08:48AM (3 children)
That's easy to fix. The people that browse without JavaScript enabled are statistically insignificant (even Google runs JavaScript when indexing, to prevent sites providing static content for them to index and then replacing it with other crap for real people) and so blocking them is of negligible economic impact. It would be easy for the sites to provide a placeholder in the HTML and have JavaScript fetch it. With HTTP/2 (supported by all modern browsers), the server can push resources before you request them, so you wouldn't even suffer latency issues: the article content could arrive at the same time as the placeholder, but it will not be inserted into the page until the JavaScript updates the DOM.
I don't block ads, but I do run Disconnect and Click-To-Plugin to avoid tracking and malware. This does have the side effect of blocking most ads, but if a site wants to get around this by showing me simple non-tracking text or image ads then I don't mind.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Monday July 31 2017, @09:25AM (2 children)
Almost as annoying as the ads are the social media buttons that either occupy a full non-scrolling bar or sit on the side, also in a non-scrolling box. Then there is the full bar wanting you sign up for their mailing list, the static navigation bar at the top that usually isn't entirely static because some asshole wanted to be more clever than he actually is. And so on. It always amazes me when I see a web browser on someone else's desktop viewing a site I also go to. Woah, how do you navigate that mess?
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Monday July 31 2017, @07:47PM
Whenever I'm at family and surf on their computers to popular news sites, I'm always aghast at the site.
Worst experience was when little gnomes were hopping all over the bottom of the screen and started tapping against the screen (with sound effects).
On a major news site *facepalm*
All those moving/blinking/flashing ads come across as if the site does not respect its content writers.
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Wednesday August 02 2017, @07:46PM
All those floaty boxes seem designed to irritate.
The geniuses at work decided to put a floating "back to top of page" button on our intranet site. The damn thing appears on any page that is bigger than the browser window and that wouldn't be so bad if there wasn't a huge menu header on ever page, thereby making pretty much everything larger than the browser window. I forget the wording, but it's just big enough to obscure part of the actual content. I think I'll install uMatrix on the browser tomorrow.